We build WYSIWYG editors for sharing richly-annotated source; we use glass TTY editors (vi, emacs) to hammer on flat ASCII files in which most of the metadata (comments) is completely unstructured.

i just discovered jon udells very interesting newsgroups. some nice quotes about software development in the web era:

greg wilson on why xml-style coding might not catch on:

Many programmers would rather change the way the global economy works than change the way they brace and indent their C code. Many also program as an end in itself (even when they’re being paid to do so). They don’t see an advantage in switching to a format that looks odd (compared to what they’ve been weaned on), and whose primary benefits are team-oriented (lower long-term maintenance costs, easier for newcomers to navigate the code, etc.).

very very sad. i’d gladly switch to tools that allow me to capture my intent on a higher semantical level. however there is apparently hope:

greg again:

I am hoping that as old programmers die off, younger ones will start bringing tools that they’re used to using in other contexts into the coding arena. For example, the proportion of programmers using IDEs instead of legacy command line tools (Emacs + gdb, makefiles, etc.) seems to be increasing. I believe this is because students are introduced to both while they’re still impressionable, so they can choose without worrying about the cost of change.

on the need to include communication in the process:

Finally, LP systems only addressed the problem of “static” communication — I write a doc, you read it, information flows one way. This only addresses the needs of big corporate dev environments, where audit trails and 20-year life cycles are an issue. I’ll bet most of the people reading this group need something much more fluid to sustain their day-to-day work. Even those of us in our late thirties are now used to the “dynamic” 2-way threaded ongoing communication of newsgroups like this. I’ve watched developers in their 20s use Messenger to throw around hasty sketches of data structures and snippets of code while chatting; offer them an IDE that does this, and their reaction is likely to be, “Well, duh, about time.”

i for one would love to integrate jabber with my ide. given a decent xslt, these conversations could be nicely integrated with the source to provide more clues about the code.

sourceforge is a first attempt at such a highly integrated ide that tries to embrace group ware. finally there seems to be a very good book by karl fogel on Open Source Development With CVS that will hopefully be on my bookshelf one day.

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